80 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Book!!, November 13, 2005
This review is from: Excel Advanced Report Development (Paperback)
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in -- or who needs to learn about -- PivotTables, as well as Excel reporting in general. The coverage in this book is comprehensive, providing information on Excel report topics that just isn't available in most other books.
Here are just 10 items that I learned about from this book:
1. Prompting the user for parameters in Excel reports (Chapter 11): Parameters can be used with PivotTable lists or Spreadsheet reports, and they can also make the report run much faster and filter the returned dataset to a particular date range, division or product line.
2. Building Report Control Centers (Chapter 11): I learned how to build Spreadsheet report control centers that accept parameters and support a number of helpful functions, including:
* Automatic report refreshes when a parameter value is changed
* Drop-down lists of valid values that the user can choose to automatically refresh a report
* Specific field formats to ensure that the data is entered correctly
And, I learned how to do all this through simple, native graphical tools - there was no need for complex VBA programming!
3. Creating ultra-fast client-side OLAP cubes (Chapter 10): Given that I'm not actually data warehouse savvy, nor do I have the time to learn Analysis Services, Excel's client-side OLAP was perfect for me. I've been able to use it to organize data into dimension-level hierarchies for drilling-through data. And I was able to automatically rebuild OLAP cubes directly from Excel. The best part -- all 3 client-side OLAP cubes are covered in extensive detail in this book, unlike most other books on this topic which tend to just cover OLAP cubes in passing.
4. Hiding SQL queries (Chapter 6): I learned how to hide SQL queries from users in order to prevent them from viewing or modifying my report query.
5. Retrieving Data from OLTP databases (Chapter 2-9, 11, and 12): This book provides numerous examples of how data can be extracted from Access, SQL and Oracle databases, which has proved to be invaluable to me at work. And, this book also covers Text files (Chapter 3), OLAP cubes (Chapter 10), Web Sites (Chapter 11) and other data sources (Chapter 3). I even learned how to extract data from multiple databases - on the same or different servers (Chapter 6).
6. Fixing annoying problems with field names (Chapter 7): I learned how field headings from SQL queries can get corrupted - this book explained why this happens and, more importantly, how to fix it.
7. Publishing and using web-enabled reports (Chapter 12): This book dedicates an entire chapter to web-enabled reports. It shows how the best features of PivotTable and Spreadsheet reports are combined into PivotTable lists - and how to navigate through all the new functions, features and tools.
8. Restricting the number of rows returned (Chapter 7): This book showed me how to restrict the number of rows returned in a PivotTable and Spreadsheet reports.
9. Comprehensive coverage of PivotCharts (Chapter 9): This book dedicates an entire chapter to PivotCharts - and it focuses only on the important and relevant tools, techniques, features and functions of PivotCharts.
10. Complete SQL reference (Appendix B): I just have a basic knowledge of writing SQL. The appendix in this book was great! It really helped me fill in some of my gaps with basic SQL and I'm not writing more advanced SQL queries - thanks to this book!
The author even helped me out with a few questions that I had about using text files (his email address is in the last chapter). I highly recommend that you buy this book if you have any interest in PivotTable or other types of Excel reporting books. It's truly the best on the subject!
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29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best on the subject, September 5, 2005
This review is from: Excel Advanced Report Development (Paperback)
The MS Query Program is one of Microsoft's best-kept secrets. It is almost impossible to find *thorough* documentation, much less good examples of how to use it.
After struggling for over two years learning to use MS Query by trial and error, I was extremely pleased to find this book.
I just wish the author had covered Oracle a bit more, since I have discovered that MS Query doesn't always work as advertised with Oracle, or at least Oracle 8i. For example, you cannot rename columns when accessing Oracle.
I am also curious about a statement on page 70, where he is describing the process of setting up a DSN for a CSV file. He states, "WARNING: A software bug in Microsoft Excel requires that fields with a data type of Char be set to LongChar." There is no further explanation for this, except that he mentions that the data may be corrupted.
I have used DSNs for text files (CSV and tab-delimited)in MS Query and in other programs for about two years, and have never encountered a problem with this. In fact, I had never heard of "LongChar" before this.
Furthermore, I tried to set up a query using a DSN that I had created using this advice, and it did not work. It worked fine once I changed the data type back to Char.
But I gave it five stars anyway, because it is the best book available on this subject, which seems to have eluded other Excel users and authors.
Marty Ryerson.
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